Korryn Gaines broadcast her standoff with police on social media.
Photograph: facebook image

In the middle of a five-hour standoff that ended in the death of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County police department to take her social media accounts offline, police have said.

Baltimore County police officers shot and killed Gaines on Monday after she barricaded herself inside her Randallstown apartment with her five-year-old son and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant on charges stemming from a 10 March traffic stop including disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Black woman shot dead by police during alleged standoff while holding son

Read more

Gaines was using social media to broadcast the standoff, which began when officers showed up on Monday morning to serve a warrant. Police officials asked Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to suspend Gaines’ accounts through what police called a “law enforcement portal”, a part of the site open to certified law enforcement agencies.

At some point after that, police shot Gaines, killing her.

“We did in fact reach out to social media authorities to deactivate her account, to take it offline, if you will,” the Baltimore County police chief, James Johnson, said on Tuesday. “Why? In order to preserve the integrity of the negotiation process with her and for the safety of our personnel [and] her child. Ms Gaines was posting video of the operation as it unfolded. Followers were encouraging her not to comply with negotiators’ request that she surrender peacefully.”

He added that it took more than an hour from the time police contacted Facebook for the account to be taken down. He said the account had not been deleted and that it would now be used as evidence.

Though Baltimore County has implemented a body camera program, it is only a few weeks into implementation and according to police none of the officers involved were wearing body cameras, meaning the Facebook video could become particularly important. A police spokeswoman, Elise Armacost, said the department was obtaining a warrant to obtain the videos as evidence.

Activists, however, see such video as the only hope of countering the police narrative. “They get on the 11 o’clock news or the Baltimore Sun with the police side and then everyone forgets it,” said Duane “Shorty” Davis, a Baltimore activist who regularly films encounters with police. “They control the narrative, but in controlling the narrative they have to control social media, because it’s our narrative,” he said. “To keep our message from getting out, they’re going to take [social media] out.”

Control of video footage has been contested in two other recent controversial police shootings. The man who owned the convenience store in Baton Rouge where Alton Sterling was killed by police last month said officers took the surveillance video without a warrant or his consent. He hid the cellphone he used to tape the video of the shooting from the police, and shared it with media organizations.

And Diamond Reynolds – who used used Facebook’s live video feature one day later to film her boyfriend, Philando Castile, after he was shot by police in a suburb of St Paul – has claimed that police physically took her phone and deleted the video of Castile dying. “They took my phone. They took over my Facebook,” she said. “Everyone who shared my video, they don’t want you guys to be a part of this; they don’t want us to support each other.”

In 2012, when most social media sites were still in their infancy, James MacArthur, a black Baltimore activist and blogger who produces an internet radio show under the name Baltimore Spectator, livestreamed a standoff with police on his show. Like Gaines, MacArthur was publicly critical of police and was legally armed. When officers attempted to serve a failure-to-appear warrant at his home – the same thing that led to Gaines’ barricade – MacArthur would not come out and the incident ended in a lengthy standoff with police.

MacArthur broadcast the entire situation, including his negotiations with police, drawing a large audience. He believes that that online audience is one of the only reasons he is alive today. “I knew that was my only chance,” MacArthur said. “What’s most noteworthy about my incident was my use of social media and you see that they went immediately after that in this case.”

Gaines had filmed police on previous occasions, including during one incident which led to the warrant she was being served with when she was killed. In March, according to police reports, an officer pulled Gaines over because she had a piece of cardboard with writing on it instead of a license plate. “Any government official who compromises this pursuit of happiness and right to travel, will be held criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right and freedom,” the cardboard plate said.

Gaines told the officer he had no authority to question her. One officer threatened to use a Taser. She said they would have to murder her in order to get her out of the car, in which she had her two children.

In one of at least three videos she took during the incident, she coached one of the children: “Make sure you record everything,” as an officer grabbed her by the wrist to pull her from the car.

In captions on Instagram videos of the incident, Gaines said that the officers “threatened to break my limbs”.

Gaines said she spent two days “in isolation and being starved nd [sic] with no water”, before she was released with charges of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and littering.

She did not show up to court to face these charges, which resulted in the bench warrant three officers showed up to serve on Monday morning. According to Johnson, the police chief, they were also serving a warrant on her boyfriend, Kareem Courtney, for a domestic violence complaint that Gaines brought against him.

The couple would not allow the officers in and the police got a key from the apartment management. According to Johnson, when they tried to open the door, a security chain kept it from opening all the way. “They could clearly see a female that they believed to be Ms Gaines seated on the floor, a child nearby, who immediately began to wield a shotgun around, bringing it up to ready position, pointing it directly at the officers there to serve the arrest warrant,” Johnson said.

Johnson said they immediately summoned tactical and support personnel who obtained a separate warrant charging Gaines with assaulting a police officer.

At some point, Courtney left with the younger of the two children in the apartment. He has been charged with second-degree assault related to a fight with Gaines and released on his own recognizance.

In one of the videos of the standoff which has remained online, Gaines asks her five-year-old child: “Who is outside?” When he answers that it is the police she asks why. “To kill us,” the child says.

Around 3pm, according to Johnson, Gaines “brought the weapon up to the ready position, announced to one or more of the tactical team personnel: ‘If you don’t leave, I’m going to kill you.’”

Instead of leaving, an officer fired, and Gaines returned the fire. “Our personnel returned three rounds of fire, striking her and killing her,” said Johnson.

No officers were injured, but Gaines’ child was also shot. He was wounded in the arm and is in a good condition in hospital. “We do not know at this moment in time if the child was struck by our round, her round, shrapnel from our round, shrapnel from her round,” Johnson said. He said they did not know where the child was when the shooting occurred.

The names of the officers still have not been released, in accordance with the contract the county has with the police union.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland strongly condemned the action, saying in a statement that police “decided that they needed to use deadly force to execute that warrant, and needed to expose themselves to the known risk of deadly force being used on them, knowing that a five year old child might be in the line of fire”.